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Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

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Enterprise Architecture

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

News

Apple has announced that Swift 1.0 has reached GM status on iOS and developers can now start submitting apps that use Swift. The language will continue to evolve, say Apple, as it has done since its announcement at WWDC 2014 last June. This is a short summary of its evolution.

A group of representatives from Stack Exchange, GitHub, Reddit, and others have started to standardize and enhance Markdown under the name Standard Markdown. Their efforts have met the opposition of John Gruber, the syntax’s creator, who does not want to see Markdown used in other projects, so the project was eventually renamed CommonMark.

During the recent GlueCon 2014 conference in Colorado, Tony Tam, the creator of Swagger and CEO of Reverb, gave a well attended talk on Swagger APIs for humans (and robots), where he announced the Swagger 2.0 Working Group and an early version of an online code editor offering a dynamic YAML to Swagger UI conversion.

Nightwatch is a recently released acceptance framework based on Node.js that uses Selenium WebDriver API to automate web applications testing. The tool promises a simple syntax which enables the writing of end-to-end tests using JavaScript and CSS selector that runs against a Selenium server.

Since the initial Lambda proposal was released (and the in-depth InfoQ analysis), there has been a subsequent state of the lambda which has significantly moved the goalposts of the lambda project in JDK 7. Read on to find out what's new.

LESS and Sass are Ruby tools that allow to reduce redundancy in CSS files by introducing variables, mixins, and other time proven language features into CSS. We take a look at how the two tools work and what they offer.

Ola Bini, a core JRuby developer and author of the book Practical JRuby on Rails Projects, has been developing a new language for the JVM called Ioke. This strongly typed, extremely dynamic, prototype based object oriented language aims to give developers the same kind of power they get with Lisp and Ruby, combined with a nice, small, regular syntax.

Style enforcement has long been a hotly debated topic. Not only are their arguments over what style a team should standardize on, but also on whether or not there should be a standard style at all. In a move that is sure to add fuel to the flames, Microsoft has released StyleCop, the style enforcement tool they use internally.

C# 3 added the keyword "var". This allows for local type inference when the compiler can unequivocally determine what type the variable should be. There is, however, some debate as to when it should be used.

Collection initializers were supposed to be released along with LINQ in C# 3 and VB 9. While C# did get them, they were cut from the VB release. Part of the reason was the Visual Basic team wanted to make VB's version more powerful. We present the leading options for the new syntax.

Line continuation characters have always been a wart on the VB syntax. Unlike languages in the Pascal and C families, Visual Basic does not require a trailing semi-colon to denote the end of a statement. The trade-off for this is that it does need a character to indicate when the statement does not end. Paul Vic is proposing to eliminate continuation characters in most common cases.